Mareesa Stertz emphasizes the importance of community, storytelling, and art in intentional psychedelic integration, highlighting how shared experiences and creative expression foster healing and self-awareness. By incorporating these elements, individuals can deepen their journey, turn challenges into growth, and build a supportive environment for lasting transformation.
Key Takeaways
- Mareesa’s healing journey with psychedelics was gradual and layered, with small micro-shifts and realizations, highlighting the importance of integration and subtle changes over time.
- The creation of community and shared resources, exemplified by the Global Psychedelic Society and projects like the Sphinx Gate, are essential for sustainable, collective healing outside clinical settings.
- Viewing challenges and personal growth through frameworks like the Hero’s Journey and emphasizing play, storytelling, and community can make the process of healing more empowering, joyful, and meaningful.
- Psychedelic Passage: Your Psychedelic Concierge — The easy, legal way to find trustworthy psilocybin guides, facilitators and psychedelic-assisted therapy near you in the United States
This week, we meet Mareesa Stertz, a filmmaker, storyteller, artist, and community organizer dedicated to fostering collective healing and transformation. As a co-founder of the Global Psychedelic Society (GPS) and Lucid News, Mareesa has been building platforms that destigmatize, educate, and build community around psychedelics.
Drawing from her own journey of trauma and transformation, Mareesa is passionate about using storytelling and art to deepen understanding and bring visibility to the process of healing and wholeness of which she has shared some of her experience on international stages, and through teaching workshops and retreats.
She’s done film work producing and hosting documentary series that can be found on Gaia TV and Amazon, and is currently bringing a large-scale immersive art project, The Sphinx Gate, to Burning Man 2025.
Settle in as we take a ride with our co-founder, Jimmy Nguyen, to explore Stertz’s unique perspective on healing, art, and psychedelics.
More From Our Guest
- Storytelling Catharsis Workshop on May 21st – Join Mareesa for her free online workshop, which will give you the opportunity to share, explore, and discover your story in a meaningful way.
- TheSphinxGate.com – How well do you Know Thyself? Donate to, or find out more about the mission to bring the Sphinx, Stertz’s immersive art, to Burning Man, 2025.
- Global Psychedelic Society – Meet other like minded individuals by joining or creating a psychedelic community of your own.
This article is inspired by our insightful podcast episode hosted by Psychedelic Passage co-founder, Jimmy Nguyen, which you can listen to on all streaming platforms.
Download Our Free Psilocybin Sourcing Guide
For harm-reduction purposes, we provide links to online psilocybin vendors, local stores, delivery services, and spore vendors for growing your own medicine at home.
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing
We are blest by everything
Everything we look upon
Is blest. — William B. Yeats
For Mareesa Stertz, psychedelics weren’t the main focus in her earlier endeavors. Her main focus was filmmaking, storytelling and art, while simultaneously looking for ways to heal herself.
After almost 2 decades of searching for the right modality to help her heal, she finally found intentional psychedelic use. It ended up being the puzzle piece that yoga and talk therapy just couldn’t match up to.
Through her personal experiences with psychedelics, she realized their incredible healing potential when used intentionally, and wanted to use her filmmaking and storytelling skills to spread awareness and give others a platform to share.
Where it All Began
Mareesa was introduced to psychedelics at 15 years old;
“Psychedelics have been a part of my life since I was 15. I did mushrooms at a Steve Miller band concert and I immediately appreciated them. And at the same time, they were very unpredictable, sometimes opening up things and getting me out of my head in ways that felt really cathartic and helpful. And other times magnifying my pain in ways that I didn’t understand how to deal with. I was just like, ‘I’m so broken psychedelics don’t work for me.’ I basically was lacking role models or teachers around me.” — Mareesa Stertz
The first few times that Mareesa took a psychedelic, she described the experience as hard and uncomfortable — magnifying her pain, and leaving her no better than when she started.
The Subtleties of Major Breakthroughs
She took a hiatus from psychedelics for this very reason, focusing more on filmmaking and art. During this “hiatus,” there was an exception. Stertz was introduced to ayahuasca around 2007 where again, she felt unchanged.
This led to her focusing her energy on releasing this blockage that appeared to hinder her from doing any healing at all, and she continued on to sit with ayahuasca for a total of 7 times over 12 years each time being uneventful and difficult.
Most of the time, she describes being curled up in a ball, processing the unprocessed emotions that she carried with her. She did not have visuals, demons or otherwise, she instead was stuck in her head. She had looping thoughts and felt shame.
These ayahuasca experiences almost became an echochamber of the societal conditioning that culminated into the parts of herself that needed healing the most, illuminating why she needed healing.
These trips may have illuminated what she needed to heal from, but it was only much later, partly thanks to her journals, did she become consciously aware of the incredible effects that ayahuasca was having on her.
“I used to be really, really shy. I couldn’t look people in the eyes. I didn’t believe in myself. And that first time of doing ayahuasca, afterwards I was looking at my journals and putting things together and I’m like, my God, it all went away that year. Not completely, but enough. And I could suddenly look people in the eye. And so all these times I thought it didn’t work, even though it didn’t give me some big grandiose experience that so many others were walking away with, little micro shifts were happening at a speed that I couldn’t quite measure when I was living it and I could only see from the other side.” — Mareesa Stertz
It doesn’t take an epiphany to have a major breakthrough, sometimes the action comes before becoming consciously aware of it, which is why practicing integration methods such as journaling can help you realize your progress.
What Flipped The Switch?
Well, I have a feeling you won’t be surprised to discover how Mareesa broke her spiritual drought. It’s a theme that arises over and over again when we talk about enacting real change. You may have heard of it, it’s called hitting rock bottom.
Mareesa’s healing journey reached a tipping point when she was on a film shoot in Panama. She describes feeling overwhelmed by childhood patterns of insecurity, perfectionism, and a need for approval, which resurfaced during this challenging film shoot, leading to burnout and depression.
Recognizing her destructive mental and emotional patterns, she quit halfway through filming. She felt broken, chronically fatigued, and spent several weeks in a hostel in Panama sleeping and ruminating before deciding to find inner healing through an ayahuasca journey in Peru.
Once in Peru, she met many fellow travelers on the same spiritual journey as her, and through them she was able to vet possible curanderos and find two centers that resonated with her.
During her experience, she participated in multiple dieta (plant medicine retreats, typically lasting a week), where she pushed through fatigue and resistance. After a handful of null experiences, she was given an especially potent ayahuasca brew and was able to break through and meet the spirit of ayahuasca.
It asked her if she wanted to create life. She accepted this invitation, which resulted in a vision of a hummingbird pouring elixir into her, which represented a connection to her purpose of storytelling and creative expression.
This visionary experience marked a significant breakthrough, helping her understand her true calling and resolve deep-seated patterns she couldn’t seem to get away from prior to this experience.
Instead of dwelling on what could be wrong with her, she came out of this experience ready to make the most of whatever cards she had been dealt, whether she was truly “sick” as she felt she was, or not.
About nine months later, she received funding for her documentary series, Healing Powers, indicating that her healing journey contributed to her creative success and personal growth.
How Psilocybin Mimics The Hero’s Journey
This brings us to our old friend, the universal skills concept. Again and again we say the same thing; the tools and skills that are necessary to navigate a psychedelic experience, are the same ones needed to navigate life.
This is exemplified by research done by Brouwer et al (2024), where they explore the notion that the psychedelic mushroom experience mimics the narrative of the hero’s journey, which is a concept coined by Joseph Campbell in his 1948 book, The hero with a thousand faces.
The hero’s journey is a popular story arc in literature dating back hundreds if not thousands of years, and Stertz explains it as such:
“For those maybe not so familiar with the hero’s journey, the idea is that we begin in the known world where all is predictable. And then we embark on a series of challenges. Those challenges build into a critical mass where we land in the abyss, where we just feel like complete failures. But eventually they’re long enough and you start to have insight, revelation, and you make your way out.” — Mareesa Stertz
One possible challenge one may face during a psychedelic experience is facing fears. It may be something we weren’t even consciously aware of, but psychedelics can amplify our fears and show us all aspects of them, which actually can be fruitful to heal from them.
Because how is one supposed to heal from something they aren’t consciously aware of?
It’s in the act of persevering and finding our way through to the other side that we strengthen ourselves, and in turn are better able to cope with challenges in the future.
Recommended Reading: The Truth About Psychedelic Bad Trips
Viewing your life story as a Hero’s Journey has more of an impact than you might think. According to Rogers et al (2023), viewing one’s life as a Hero’s journey actually increases meaning in life.
Through eight separate studies, they examined how people viewed their lives in relation to the Hero’s journey and meaning, which pointed to, “a profound connection between the lives we live and the stories we tell. In particular, our findings show that seeing life as similar to the enduring and ubiquitous Hero’s Journey narrative can lend life deeper meaning.” (p. 63)
“Which means the abyss, your breakdown, your illness, your heartbreak, your depression, whatever it is, maybe it’s not some random bad thing that happened to you. Maybe it is the rite of passage that you needed to become fully aware of whatever unconscious beliefs and programs you inherited from your childhood, from your caregivers, from all the belief systems we are embedded with, all the stories we inherit, and that you need to navigate that abyss in order to become aware of the unconscious and become more conscious and more sovereign.” — Mareesa Stertz
A key part to Joseph Campbell’s idea of a Hero’s Journey is receiving help from others, and in return being able to help the community that the hero returns to.
It’s important to note because while you may come out of the journey with more sovereignty, it’s much more conducive to accept help throughout the journey, and even after as you integrate the experience into your everyday life.
Recommended Reading: How Community Amplifies Psychedelic Healing
Storytelling: A Communal & Empowering Expression
Mareesa shares another concept that helps us materialize our own stories: Marc Gafni’s idea of pre and post tragic consciousness.
Here, Marc describes three levels of consciousness in which we experience life. First, there’s the pre-tragic stage, where one’s life is good, but there is also suffering. Only, we find a way to explain away the suffering, such as religion or scientific explanations.
The second stage is tragic — where we are no longer able to explain our suffering. Here one may feel intense suffering and are no longer able to “explain it away.”
These two stages don’t have to happen consecutively, it depends on the details in each individual’s life.
Then there is the post-tragic stage. According to Gafni, not everyone will reach this post-tragic stage, as it necessitates the individual being able to reconnect with the elemental joy of living.
“The initial stories are the ones that were essentially handed down to us through our environment or those who taught us. And then there’s this phase of us acting out those stories. And then there’s this part where we kind of have a choice of what stories we put down and what stories we carry forward.” — Jimmy Nguyen
If we follow this paradigm, we can see that rewriting your story is liberating and almost necessary to live a non-performative life, one that is truly fulfilling and liberating.
The biggest part of this evolution is rewriting your story, meaning it’s okay for your story to change as time goes on, that’s the epitome of growth, and growth takes time.
In this sense, you must give yourself permission to tell the old, messy stories before your true self rises from the ashes.
Give Yourself Permission
A big part of Mareesa’s mission is the idea of play. Rediscovering yourself should be fun and enjoyable. Find space to laugh as you work through the deepest parts of yourself. That playful, expressionist energy is so much more rejuvenating than coming from a place of fear, as Mareesa exemplifies in her own healing journey.
“I think there’s a lot of folks who think about their mental health and psychedelic work where a lot of it feels like work, or folks who are really rolling up their sleeves to do a lot of deep trauma and grief work. So I just acknowledge for some folks that joy and play can seem like really alien concepts for folks and at the same time, I do believe it’s very accessible.” — Jimmy Nguyen
The Sphinx Gate Project
The Conception
When Mareesa Stertz first embarked on her healing journey, she was still caught up in the preconceived narratives that haunted her.
This resulted in her overdoing her healing in a way. While she was doing yoga, meditation, and psychedelic experiences, she tackled it in a way that put too much pressure on herself.
Phrases like, “You need to heal faster” or “You need to work harder” swarmed her troubled soul as she earnestly tried to heal herself using her old, messy narrative.
As she moved forward in her healing journey, she began questioning herself, was she coming from a place of love, or was she forcing herself to move through the motions?
She realized she needed to build a new model for her to interact with her own healing. At the same time she was focusing on the act of creating: how can she create more, specifically cultivate a culture that celebrates healing.
She found that while she was creating, she was joyous, inspired, and having more fun. Over time, she knew that this was what would carry her farthest down her healing journey.
While she admits she is still working to embody it fully, she notices a difference in herself.
“Fear and scarcity had run me down completely. There was no regenerative energy. Where I’m operating now, I finally found a way to kind of keep my center, and I work a lot, but I can hold it and I feel like I have some sense of balance as I’m doing it.” — Mareesa Stertz
This is where the Sphinx comes in. Stertz attended Burning Man in 2018, and as she biked across the Playa she thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if the Sphinxes from The Neverending Story were here?”
She reverberated that question over and over again, to different people, until the idea gained traction. Before she knew it she had a full-blown interactive art exhibit in the making.
The Materialization of The Sphinx Gate
The creation of the Sphinx Gate project began because people believed it in. The more people she told, the more people wanted to help.
And so, the project was born.
Sphinxes are mythical creatures that have arisen in many cultures, and one common vein is that they ask humans to know themselves better.
Many of us feel the world is teetering like a top, threatening to fall at any moment. The question becomes, what can we do to help?
As carriers of riddles, the two Sphinxes at Burning Man 2025 will stand 34 feet tall and invite humans to better know themselves.
How? With a 45 minute to 1 hour interactive art quest that leads each person to collect the wisdom of their own lived experiences into a talisman, through mind, body, breath, heart, community, and destiny.
The Sphinxes will then open their eyes, shoot lasers, and in turn participants will receive a mission from an oracle designed to help them continue their quest long after The Man is done burning.
“The idea here is how do we make it fun to work on ourselves? How can we reframe our struggles, our obstacles, our mental health battles, whatever they are, how is our challenge here to help us grow? And how do we learn who we are because of those challenges? And how do we do this in community? How do we make it fun?” — Mareesa Stertz
This interactive art exhibit echoes one of the biggest themes in psychedelic work, which is how to know yourself better, so that you can be in better relationship with yourself and the world around you.
The Global Psychedelic Society
The Global Psychedelic Society began as an effort to unify and connect psychedelic communities worldwide, which previously operated more independently.
Initially, these communities gathered through education events, harm reduction activities, and resource sharing, but Mike Margoils, Jazz Kaddish and Mareesa Stertz recognized that it lacked a centralized platform.
After bringing together community leaders for conferences, including a summit with 70 leaders in the psychedelic space, an official organization with a website was born.
This facilitated greater collaboration, resource sharing, and community building to support people involved in psychedelic work, especially outside the medical or clinical settings.
The universal drive for community speaks for itself. Without community, we are isolated beings in an echochamber of our own thoughts, and that isn’t always good for our mental health.
By fusing community into psychedelic healing and integration, we see just how powerful community can be.
“When community is part of the container, it’s a lot more self-sustaining, regenerative.” — Mareesa Stertz
Not only does it offer support, but it offers a glimpse into other people’s stories, and hearing similar struggles or breakthroughs to your own is just another way that community can inspire healing.
Healing Isn’t a Solo Journey
You never should feel alone in your search for healing and self-discovery, you surely have us in your corner.
- Embracing Vulnerability: Discover the power of openness when sharing your psychedelic experiences, to foster a sense of belonging and acceptance.
- Involving Friends or Family: Discover how to ask for support, and the pros and cons to having a friend or family member, or even a pet attend your ceremony.
- Find The Value in Anecdotes: Still not sure what you’re getting yourself into? Check out other’s stories to get a better idea on how magic mushrooms make you feel.
- You Are Not Alone Unless You Want To Be: Find like minded individuals who can support you during your healing journey, or get safety tips for tripping alone.
- Ensuring Ethical Facilitation: Hear straight from the horse’s mouth what proper psychedelic facilitation should and shouldn’t look like.
- Psychedelics & Parenting: Being mindful of yourself isn’t the only thing that comes with expanded awareness, learn how it can affect your family dynamics and motherhood as well.
- Maintaining Authenticity After Integration: Understand the significance of preserving internal integrity through psychedelic integration, emphasizing the role of genuine self-reflection in sustaining personal evolution.
Connect With The Psychedelic Coach That’s Right for You
Hi there! We sincerely hope that you’ve found valuable takeaways that resonate with your current intentions. To explore research-based education, stay updated with psychedelic news, and benefit from practical how-to articles, we encourage you to head over to our resources page.
If you’re seeking personalized advice and are prepared to take the first step toward a therapeutic psychedelic experience, we invite you to book a consultation with our team of experienced psychedelic concierges.
This consultation is more than just a conversation; it’s an opportunity to be matched with a trustworthy local facilitator. You’ll be seamlessly connected to our rigorously vetted network of psychedelic guides, ensuring potential matches align with your needs.
Psychedelic Passage offers confidence and peace of mind by alleviating the burden of having to guess who’s right for you. If you want to discover how Psychedelic Passage can help you, we empower you to learn more about our services and check out client testimonials from those who’ve gone before you.
Your healing path is uniquely yours, and our commitment is to serve you at every juncture. Psychedelic Passage: Your Psychedelic Concierge — The easy, legal way to find trustworthy psilocybin guides, facilitators and psychedelic assisted therapy near you in the United States.
Learn More About Our Network
- Book a Consultation Call
- Meet Our Referral Network
- Explore Frequently Asked Questions
- Watch Client Testimonials
- Is Psychedelic Passage Safe & Legit?
More Psychedelic Passage
- Listen to our podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
- Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
- Follow us on Reddit
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How can storytelling and art enhance the process of psychedelic integration and healing?
Storytelling and art serve as powerful tools for expressing and recontextualizing psychedelic experiences, helping individuals make sense of their journeys, foster community connection, and cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning in their healing process.
2. Why is intentional use important in psychedelic work, and how does it differ from casual use?
Intentional psychedelic use involves deliberate preparation, set, and integration, which maximizes healing potential and minimizes risks.
Unlike casual use, intentionality fosters a mindful approach that supports personal growth and deeper self-awareness.
3. What role does community play in psychedelic healing and integration?
Community provides crucial support, shared wisdom, and validation, making healing journeys more sustainable and enriching. Engaging with others helps normalize experiences, reduce isolation, and enhances collective learning and growth.
4. How does viewing life as a Hero’s Journey influence personal meaning and resilience in psychedelic work?
Seeing life as a Hero’s Journey frames challenges as rites of passage and opportunities for growth, helping individuals find deeper purpose, resilience, and understanding of their own stories, especially during difficult psychedelic or life experiences.
5. What is the significance of playful energy in the context of healing and self-discovery?
Incorporating joy and play into healing processes encourages openness, creativity, and resilience. It helps break down fear-based mindsets, making self-exploration and transformation more accessible, fun, and sustainable long-term.
References
Brouwer, A., Brown, J. K., Earth Erowid, Fire Erowid, Thyssen, S., Raison, C. L., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2024). The Temporal Trajectory of the Psychedelic Mushroom Experience Mimics the Narrative Arc of the Hero’s Journey. Research Square (Research Square). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3941205/v1
Rogers, B. A., Chicas, H., Kelly, J. M., Kubin, E., Christian, M. S., Kachanoff, F. J., Berger, J., Puryear, C., McAdams, D. P., & Gray, K. (2023). Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(4). https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000341
Get Your Free Medication Interaction Resource
Understand potential medication & psychedelic interactions in this free 59-page PDF.
